A few things we'll point out about using the SMOBOT controller:

1. SMOBOT recommends the following startup procedure for low and slow cooking. (You will find the full version in your Quick Start guide.)
   1. Open the bottom damper on your cooker about half way.
   2. Start a small fire in the middle of the charcoal pile.
   3. Add your heat deflector and grate.
   4. Clip the pit temperature probe to the grate, shielded from direct heat.
   5. Close the cooker's lid and plug the grill temperature probe and the damper into the SMOBOT controller. Make sure the damper opens and closes on startup.
   6. Select your target temperature on the controller and press the Auto button to activate Auto mode.
   7. Once the desired temperature has been reached, place your meat on the grate, making sure the meat is at least 1 inch from the pit temperature probe.
2. Having a good seal between the dome and the base of your cooker is important. If your gasket leaks, air can enter the cooker at your bottom vent and exit the cooker through your leaky gasket. The SMOBOT controls temperature by controlling the air EXITING your cooker through the top vent, so if any air can exit via another pathway, the SMOBOT loses control of the temperature. The SMOBOT can handle very small leaks by shutting down the damper a bit more, but it can't make up for sizeable leaks. In fact, we can attempt to quantify the importance of a good seal. When we were doing our testing of Open Lid Detect, we opened the lid for a minute and then closed the lid. One iteration, we didn't notice that the pit probe's cable had looped around and the lid had closed on this loop. Here's what the temperature graph of that looked like:
   

   As you can see, we were trying to maintain 250°F and the temperature rose to about 325°F before we figured out what was going on. A relatively minor gap between the base and dome, really made a huge difference.

3. SMOBOT recommends that you open your bottom vent half way for low and slow cooks in their Startup Guide. They also provided the following guidelines. Of course, this assumes that you have a good seal with your cooker's gasket.
   • For target temperatures below 300°F, open the lower vent 50%.
   • For target temperatures above 300°F, open the lower vent 100%.
   • For target temperatures below 300°F in windy conditions, open the lower vent less than 50%, as you find necessary to maintain your target.

   Note that in all of our temperature control tests, we operated the SMOBOT with our lower vent halfway open. We did run a comparison between having the bottom vent open 50% vs. 100% when bringing a cold cooker up to 350°F. As you can see, the two runs were virtually identical:

   

4. When you are done cooking, turn off the SMOBOT controller, then manually close the damper. This will help with the damper sticking as in the closed position, there is less contact between the sliding and stationary plates. Manually moving the damper will not hurt it.
5. If you should ever turn on your SMOBOT controller and it displays a screen like this:
   

then you have accidentally brought it up into a semi-secret setup mode. Simply turn the controller off and on and things should return to normal. You do not want to change the values displayed.

6. The servo unit may occasionally make a very faint buzzing sort of noise that lasts for about a second. The buzzing may repeat on a cycle of a few seconds. This is normal. The SMOBOT is just checking the position of the servo motor.

7. A frequently asked question about temperature controllers is whether or not you should leave the adapter installed all the time and if so, how do you control air flow when you aren't using the unit. In the case of the SMOBOT, you probably don't want to leave the damper installed all the time. It isn't waterproof and you have that wire dangling down. Since the damper doesn't just pop on and off of the vent, we highly recommend either buying an OEM daisy wheel off of eBay or buying the SMOBOT cap for your cooker. In this way, you will have a dedicated cap and can leave the damper permanently installed. Just swap out your normal daisy wheel for the top with your SMOBOT damper attached.

8. Placement of the pit probe can be important. There are two schools of thought. One is that you want it located near the meat so that the controller is controlling the temperature at the location of the meat, not somewhere else. However, the probe must not touch the meat and should be at least an inch or two from the meat. If the meat influences the temperature of the probe (especially when the meat is first placed in the cooker and is cold), obviously the controller will be sensing a false pit temperature and will therefore compensate to the detriment of the desired results. The other school of thought is that if you are used to cooking by dome temperature (meaning as measured by the thermometer sticking through your dome), then you may wish to place the pit probe on the stem of your thermometer to control the temperature measured at that location.

Startup Speed: SMOBOT vs. Blowers

Intuition would seem to tell us that a blower-based controller should be able to bring a cooker up to temperature faster than the SMOBOT which utilizes the natural draft of your cooker. Once again, it seems that intuition is not always right. Granted, it's hard to conduct a perfect race between two controllers. Things like the starting size of your fire, the amount of charcoal in the cooker and the way the charcoal is stacked (i.e. how much airflow you have) will affect the results. However, we did our best to test bringing a cold cooker up to 350°F using both the SMOBOT and a blower-based controller.

As you can see, they both got our cooker up to 300°F in almost the same time. While going from cold to 300°F the SMOBOT had the damper open 100% and the blower-based controller had the blower going 100%. At that point, however, they both started fiddling and trying to slow the rise in temperature. Any difference from this point on is not based on blower versus natural draft, but rather by the algorithm that the controller uses to control the temperature. The blower-based controller was less agressive, got to 350°F first, but also overshot the target and stayed above the target for some length of time. The SMOBOT was more agressive in slowing the ascent of the temperature, so it took longer to actually get to 350°F but it stabilized near the target temperature long before the blower-based controller did. As far as we're concerned, we wouldn't buy one or the other based on how long it takes to get to a certain temperature, but certainly the SMOBOT can keep up with a blower-based controller.

Charcoal Consumption: Smobot vs. Blowers

When discussing temperature controllers, the topic of charcoal consumption often comes up. Some think that blower-based temperature controllers consume more charcoal than cooking with the natural draft. Some think the opposite. We ran some tests to determine what actually happens. We burned precisely the same weight of charcoal at 350°F using the SMOBOT controller and then using a blower-based controller. We measured the time that each controller was able to keep the cooker above 300°F. The results were pretty clear. Burning charcoal with the SMOBOT's natural draft can result in longer burns of up to 32% longer than with a blower-based controller.

Open Lid Detect Results

Open Lid Detect (OLD) is the function the detects the lid of your cooker opening, then behaving differently than normal so as to manage the cooker's temperature and prevent a big temperature spike when your cooker recovers after closing the lid. This feature is found on most temperature controllers, so how did the SMOBOT do? Here's what happened when we opened the lid of our cooker, with OLD turned off and with OLD turned on. In each case, the cooker was stable at 250°F, the lid was opened for 60 seconds, and then the lid was closed:

Open Lid Detect turned off.

Open Lid Detect turned on.

So, with no OLD function, when the cooker recovered, it overshot the target temprature by 42°F and took 29 minutes to stabilize. With the OLD function turned on, the cooker overshot by 10°F and took only 15 minutes to stabilize. Needless to say, Open Lid Detect is a feature worth turning on.

SMOBOT Control Results

But now we come down to the meat and potatoes. How well does the SMOBOT actually control the temperature of your cooker? Here are the results that we obtained when allowing the SMOBOT to control a large Big Green Egg at low, medium and high temperatures:

Target  Accuracy   Swing  Low +0.4 ° F ±1.0° F Medium -0.4° F ±2.0° F High +0.2° F ±2.5° F

SMOBOT Results

As you can see, the SMOBOT results are pretty impressive and far beyond what is adequate for cooking barbecue.

Summary

The SMOBOT is the first electronic temperature controller to control the natural draft of your cooker instead of relying on a blower to pump air into the cooker. If you think this is important, you will also find that the SMOBOT controller is extremely good at controlling the temperature of your cooker with some of the best results we've seen in all of our testing. It's WiFi/cloud features make monitoring and controlling your cooker from a laptop, desktop, tablet or smart phone insanely easy, with both web page and Application access to your controller. In the way of features, it has all the basics, although a beeper on the controller for alarms and some sort of Ramp/Keep Warm feature would be a welcome addition. The low power consumption that results from the elimination of a blower makes it possible to power the SMOBOT with a small rechargeable battery pack, which in turn means you can put all of your sensitive electronics in a watertight enclosure for when it rains. And finally, the lower charcoal consumption that comes from controlling airflow with the vents instead of a blower is also a welcome surprise. So if you are contemplating the purchase of an electronic temperature controller for your cooker, SMOBOT should definitely be on your list for consideration.

Availability

SMOBOT controllers are available from the SMOBOT web site. You can also purchase them from Amazon. If you use the following links, we get a small percentage of any sales.

Contact Information

Web: www.smobot.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/thesmobot/